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IT departments have more significant initiatives that require effective collaboration with clients and suppliers and real-time cost transparency than ever before. No longer is IT focused exclusively on just purchasing, distributing, maintaining and replacing premise-based technology. IT leaders are now working to enable a wide variety of virtualized technology-enabled services to support their businesses at massive on-demand scale to ensure the organization’s’ success. With this comes the need for more streamlined automation between systems, workflows, processes and real-time financial transparency. As their tech stack continues to grow and diversify, it’s become increasingly complicated to connect the dots between the various solutions and achieve the right level of granularity required to support the business. Being able to demonstrate value and accountability across the organization is more critical than ever, especially for effective planning, resource allocation and helping IT continually optimize their technology investments.

The growth of on-demand cloud services and pervasive anywhere/anytime mobile access have added more complexity to an already complex environment. With the subtle intricacies of ongoing operational systems, it’s imperative to keep processes such as internal service desks and ticketing systems running efficiently and smoothly. The current challenge with IT departments is the time and resources to manage multiple IT environments adequately. IT departments will find themselves in the frustrating situation of having to navigate back and forth between different systems. Through integrated lifecycle automation, IT teams can improve efficiency, minimize errors and reduce redundancy. Most importantly, think about the ability to dive deeper into the driving factors and root-causes of costs associated with invoices, contracts and other sources.

ITSM/ITEM Workflow Integration

In an earlier blog post, we talked about the difference between various IT solutions, including ITSM and ITEM. In this blog post, we’ll take it a step further and focus on the integration between the two.

Typically, ITSM focuses on how IT operates across the entire organization in terms of design, management and delivering value to clients. It’s usually bundled as the whole set of ITSM processes. At the heart is a workflow management system for handling processes such as service requests and change records.

The connection of ITSM (Service Management) and TEM (Telecom Expense Management) brings financial visibility and operational service workflows together that spans across all IT functions, allowing for a singular view into all related IT service activity. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen more customers linking their TEM solutions to ITSM applications to enable seamless lifecycle integration and real-time cost transparency. A good example is ServiceNow, which enables service and security management through a single enterprise cloud suite. This demonstrates how ITSM solutions fit into a bigger vision for an integrated suite of cloud solutions.

TEM customers see value with a seamless bilateral integration between ITSM and ITEM. Some of the advantages include:

• Streamline systems like service tickets and help desk support.
• Automated data exchange between the systems.
• Automate inventory audits, move/add/change/disconnect service requests and incident transactions.
• Unified financial and operational data pulled from the source-data in ITEM (invoices, contracts, ownership, charge assignments) can dynamically be incorporated into ITSM-based IT cost reports and GL feeds for an accurate and timely business management cost view.

Sample workflow between ITSM and Telecom Expense Management.

Connecting the Dots

Understanding IT cost is critical to driving IT value. Enterprise IT departments must effectively integrate ITEM into existing management investments and IT portfolios. With an integrated and strategic approach to managing communications services, enterprises gain timely access to information, along with more visibility and control over communications spend. Our latest white paper explores the integration points between the various IT solutions and demonstrates a fully integrated IT management lifecycle.

Download “How Expense Management Drives the Larger IT Management Ecosystem.”